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Council of Alberta University Students wants more insight into province divvied up mental health funding among schools

FILE PHOTO - Advanced Education Minister Marlin Schmidt talks in March of this year. In mid-September, he announced new streams of funding for post-secondary mental health initiatives. An Albertan student group wants insight into how the province determined which school got what.

The province’s new mental health funding project for post-secondary student needs more clarity, an Albertan student group says.

The Government of Alberta announced it would provide $25.8 million for improving university, college and trade-school student mental wellness on Monday, Sept. 11. While the Council of Alberta University Students (CAUS), which has more than 100,000 members, is pleased with the sum announced, there are some caveats.

CAUS chair Reed Larsen said that the province should be more forthcoming in how it determined how much each school received.

“We kind of don’t understand or fully know how the model is developed,” he said, adding that CAUS would like to see some hard numbers.

“It would allow us to be better advocates in the end.”

Similarly, CAUS had wanted more emphasis on a per-student model. The per-student numbers for the institutes can range from $300 per student down to $24 per student, Larsen said.

The province dolled out the funding based on a few metrics, said Marlin Schmidt, Alberta’s minister of Advanced Education.

The number of students is one of them, but the location of the campus, its students’ access to community mental health supports and the school’s demographics all factored in.

“Some students face more barriers at other institutions than others,” Schmidt said.

“We recognize that perhaps a campus in Slave Lake or Olds may not have the kind of access to community support a student in Edmonton or Calgary would have.”

The U of A received around $1 million in funding from this program, but, according to Larsen, speaking as the vice-president external of the U of A’s student union, this doesn’t represent a real increase for Alberta’s largest school.

With the cost of inflation, this static level of funding see problems occur with the school’s mental health service, he said.

While Larsen admits that U of A students have access to many community resources, he notes that many at the institution are international students or live on-campus, hindering their access to outside supports.